NYT - "Tracing the Path to Chinese Finesse "

Posting a NYT review of a new exhibit at the Met -- “Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997)." The review points to a "curiously dispassionate, not to say bloodless" feel to the work, but emphasizes that the exhibit's worth is largely in its revelation of method:

"... it is not for artistic merit that Xie’s work is on view. Maxwell K. Hearn, the exhibition’s organizer and a curator of Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Met, explained in an interview that the show’s main significance is in what it reveals about methods used by traditional artists. It turns out that the kind of graceful naturalism that Xie achieved in his best works came not from extensive study of nature but by tracing over and over the works of other artists on sheets of semitransparent paper.

If Xie’s procedures typified the way artists had been working for centuries, as Mr. Hearn said they do, then it challenges the idea that Chinese art is as deeply grounded in real-life experience and observation of nature as is commonly believed. Copying was the royal road to aesthetic perfection."

Hello Kitty Instantiated

I saw these two Hello Kitty related pop-ups in Shanghai mentioned on the Asian Art Museum blog recently, and the magnetic pull of Sanrio pulled me further. I was pulled back to some of the most pleasant flights I've ever had, on EVA Air, which happened to be on EVA's "Hello Kitty Jet" (left).

• Shanghai's No. 6 line, which is the only to run only in Pudong, is named the "Hello Kitty Line" -- all accents are a happy shade of pink. [Pictures via Wangjianshuo's blog]

• Listed as one of the "most bizarre hostels in the world," the Hello Kitty Houses -- also in Shanghai -- offer luxury amid cat-shaped chairs and lots of pink ribbons. [More photos here.]
• But forget not Bank of America's recent launch of Hello-Kitty themed debit accounts. And the MAC makeup line? And the Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise iPhone game?
• The question on the mind of every 11 year old in Sanrio Puroland: How can Sanrio have so effectively leveraged their brand to move from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) to full blown infrastructure projects?
• Scholarship holds the answer. Perhaps we may find the key in this business case study on SUPERbranding. Or this one, which guides the young entrepreneur through Hello Kitty's move towards unisexual appeal. See also "Hello Kitty and the Identity Politics in Taiwan" for a post-colonial perspective. Or "Japan's Gross National Cool" (Foreign Policy) for an international relations perspective. "Hello Kitty Items a Global Rage in “Zen cuteness” (Japan Times) may touch on problems of religious syncretism as well. Hello Kitty Darth Vader has a magnum opus cooking on this one.

Artspeak China - Rauschenberg

A fantastic new bilingual wiki for contemp. Chinese art - Artspeak China. The easy interface organizes information by major artists, events, institutions and movements. Already, according to Shanghaiist, garnering tens of thousands of hits per day.

My first dally in - Rauschenberg's 1985 exhibit at the Beijing National Gallery - the first officially sanctioned American exhibit since the 30s. [[ Purchase Rauschenberg's piece, left, "China Tour, 1985" here.]] From the article:

"Author Zhang Zhaohui recalls: “The exhibition halls were crowded with people who felt refreshed by a totally new form of art that they did not quite yet understand. It served to excite young Chinese artists' enthusiasm to learn from him, and the show proved a stimulant to the nascent avant-gardemovement. Overnight, a number of Chinese artists began producing 'ready-mades' and installations, and hundreds of avant-garde art groups and experimental art exhibitions appeared.”

The moment was a decisive game-changer for the direction of modern Chinese art. And there is likely no shortage of commentary on how Rauschenberg's ready-mades may have, to the bureaucrat charged with the thumbs-up or down, seemed like innocuous objects properly flaked off of the great stream of capitalist production slowly opening to the PRC. (Coded in there, too, I bet, is a sophisticated albeit unconscious theory of the political limits of irony.)

Further Reading I hope to wade through:

• SEMIOTIC WARFARE, by Martina Koppel Lang, covering the avante garde movements from '79-'89
• "The ROCI Road to Peace: Robert Rauschenberg, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War." Pamela Kachurin in the Journal of Cold War Studies (!) Winter 2002 vol.4(1)

Li Wei Photos on Wallpaper - Photoshoot

All of their MADE IN CHINA issue available online.

Flashback - The Convertible Capitol Building

Reading an old Robert Darton article in the NY Review of Books, "The Library in the New Age":

"Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time. More than a million blogs have emerged during the last few years. They have given rise to a rich lore of anecdotes about the spread of misinformation, some of which sound like urban myths. But I believe the following story is true, though I can't vouch for its accuracy, having picked it up from the Internet myself. As a spoof, a satirical newspaper, The Onion, put it out that an architect had created a new kind of building in Washington, D.C., one with a convertible dome. On sunny days, you push a button, the dome rolls back, and it looks like a football stadium. On rainy days it looks like the Capitol building. The story traveled from Web site to Web site until it arrived in China, where it was printed in the Beijing Evening News. Then it was taken up by the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, CNN, Wired.com, and countless blogs as a story about the Chinese view of the United States: they think we live in convertible buildings, just as we drive around in convertible cars."

Some criticism of Darton's account here, an original story in Wired, and from 2005 about another incident where bloggers cycled rumors that Google was preparing to purge all information it couldn't index...also from an Onion article. [via Danwei.] And the original Onion article here.

Related and separate, a story from two years ago here about Pasadena Now, which has outsourced local reporting to India [one staffer sits in Bombay on a $12K salary, another in Banglore on a 7K salary]. Maureen Dowd [ugh] last year wrote a foreign-local correspondent on the job:

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”